SS-20, Gallery2 and rendering 1920 jpeg images in one batch.

In one of my earlier posts you could see the mention that the SparcStation-20 is still useable for many things in today’s application world but that there were limitations.. one of those limitations is image rendering

Last week I installed Gallery2 and uploaded all my holiday pictures. With all the thumbnails and resizes this came down to a grand total of 1920 pictures that had to be converted by Gallery2.

A couple of tips:

• Be very patient and calculate ruffly one to three minutes for an image to be rendered.
• Don’t use the GD toolkit. It eats memory and due to the slow CPU the rendering will cause PHP script time outs.
• Use ImageMagick’s toolkit. Your HTTPD process will fork() the ‘convert’ binary which can run for as long as it needs, without causing PHP script timeouts and therefor broken images or white pages.
• Try to avoid the usage of NFS shares for your g2_data directory. This will slow things down tremendously.

Furthermore, read the article about caching. It’s really worth it to explore the acceleration features offered by Gallery2 and/or to implement a reverse caching proxy.